two so thank you all very much. [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2015] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and ac that a lot are watching american history tv. 48 hours of programming on american history every weekend on c-span 3. follow us on twitter for information on a schedule of upcoming programs and to keep up with the latest history news. >> each week, american history tv sits in on a lecture with one of the nation's college professors. next depaul university professor, joseph schwieterman talks about the evolution of railroad stations. he talks about how terminals have been closed are redeveloped and the factors that contribute to how the land is reused. he describes what it means for

small towns to lose railroad business. this class is about an hour. >> tonight we have a special lecture. we will talk about redeveloped ment. nice to have him on campus. we will look at redevelopment. we are going to study a place that is trying to make a transformation from a railroad city with lots of railroad employment and connections to a first-class center with expansion of o'hare. it involves redevelopment.

a city that 10 or so years ago was labeled one of the 10 most dying cities in the united states. real excitement. it will be a fun project for you guys. we will talk for a little bit about why looking at redevelopment at the decline of the railroad industries a great way of how cities reinvent themselves. we are in downtown chicago. here is an old station. the first thing you probably see is the weather looks nice. one day we will get sunlight that but not today. our city, probably more than any other city in the united states, has benefited from this in -- the decline in industry. the so-called chicago miracle

that got so much attention during our olympic eight was largely due to a confluence of some of the needs of our city, but also a freeing up of land and development by the railways. other cities were not so lucky. detroit stands out. if you want open land, detroit has it. bad news, it is not a land people once. our city will see, it was the right place at the right time. we will talk through this a bit. i would like to hear your perspectives on the analysis you did this week and some visits you may be doing coming up. it is a profound story. dearborn station is gone. if you go there tonight to buy a ticket to california, you would be disappointed. the santa fe streamliner last left in 1971.

this is a relevant place to start. as early as the 1930's, the city wanted to eliminate the station to free up what he felt was an obstacle of redeveloping the south loop. it turned out to be an ironic story. the most decrepit of our six stations kept hanging on. the santa fe trains were immensely popular. where did they go? they followed the santa fe trail to los angeles. they were really a showpiece of transportation. when they finally left in 1971 the process began. it had a profound effect. we are seeing immense growth. partly because of the redevelopment that is occurring. a couple of you live near campus, which was unheard of

10-15 years ago. you live in downtown? >> yes. two blocks away. there is a great big building for student housing. >> anyone else? >> racine. a great area. very easy to walk toward any area of the city. accessible to mobile transportation. >> you are downtown as well? >> yeah. jackson and michigan. >> good real estate. when we look at how this process has dramatically affected our city let's start in 1870. this is kind of when people say the major railroads began. anyone remember what states this occurred in?

that's right. utah. we had the beginning of an era. you see how skeletal the system was in 1870. flashforward just a couple of decades. we move ahead to 1905. you see it is a dramatically different picture. we are in the heartland. you might as well take the black blotch and put it in the middle because the density was so thick, every few miles, you had a railroad line. you look at this, and you see that there is a lot left to come. if you look south to florida there is nothing there yet. the florida development has yet to occur. las vegas did not even exist at the time. we will see in 1905, all cities could almost be defined by their

position of the railroad system. some cities thrived because they were by the railroads. some died because they were by the railroads. we ended up with five or six transcontinental lines and more to come. the enormity of this and the land devoted to railroads when they start to retrench especially in the heartland, is astounding. let's get a sense for what the inevitable decline has meant for cities around the country. here we are in cincinnati. born in cincinnati. that is not why it is on the slide today. this is the very end of the expectation the railroad will last indefinitely.

this is the cincinnati trend will -- terminal. this is a great showpiece. what architecture would you call that? art deco style. 19 3-d33, a little bit like the chrysler building. the reason i show this picture is often times when people think of railroads, they think of stations. they don't think of entire quadrants of city. you look at the cincinnati terminal, it was built away from downtown. you had underground parking under large parts of the facility, as well as the norm is -- enormous industrial facilities. 1933 was a bad time to open a big station. cincinnati learned the hard way that the handwriting was on the wall.

within a few years, the industry was terrified at the changes it was seeing. this facility would see it within 20 years. it was heavily underutilized because things changed. if you wonder how this process began and why it was profound for smaller cities, as early as the 1930's, it was clear that railroads were doomed. you could imagine why. this is new mexico. i put this in because they have the distinction of being one of the few cities that had a railroad with the standard gauge, which meant it could go anywhere in the u.s. they felt the future was in narrow gauge railroading and they shrunk the track gauge.

by the 1940's and 1950's, it was evident that if you were to ship a rail car, it would have to be transported somewhere. you would bring it to grand junction or nearby. obviously, what is a small ship are going to avoid that sort of thing? put the material where? on a truck. the trucking industry siphons off business. but remarkably, this line hung on until the 1960's. i think we have 747s flying and development. clearly times are changing. these cities had to brace themselves for enormous changes.

at the same time, we saw electric railroads around the country were seeing the sun was setting. there was a debate around the country on what is the future. the automobile? or inner-city electric railways? people bet on one system or the other. in chicago, half a dozen of these routes. we had some great investors in chicago who put their money on electric railways. any names come to mind? >> samuel. >> that's right. he was convinced that these systems were going to really redefine inner-city transportation. by the 1930's and 1940's, we see these systems in mass. by the 1950's, almost all of

them are gone. we have one remaining. it is a block from here. >> the metro? >> sure. the south shore line. from downtown chicago to south bend. as i looked at the demise of the railroads on cities, it was evident that world war ii provided false signals to investors that the railroad era was going to last indefinitely. this shows the crowds of world war ii. dearborn station, shortly after the war. union station, the railroad was indispensable during the war. it was clear if you look at the trend that the system was ready to crumble, particularly liked -- lightly used lines.

cities and investors were misled. you have union station. we lost the beautiful concourse, which is shown in the picture on the right. it was torn down in the 1960's. the dearborn station is no longer used, but was used in the war. after world war ii, people knew change was in the air. railroad companies had to place bets. do we modernize? streamline passenger trains? compete with automobiles? or, do we accept the inevitability of change? at least for the first several

years, railroads were convinced that the growth of air travel would be confined to certain segments of the market that were not apt to take trains anyway. western was a good example of that investing in streamlined , double deck bilevel cars increasing the speed of their service. trying to run trains that were redefining the inner-city experience. for many americans, this brought back a sense that with proper investment, american railroads really could be a continuing force in travel between 100-500 miles in the u.s. what would it we looked at what it would take for trains to reassert themselves in that market. this next slide says it all. go to 1942. look at the size of the number of trains of downtown terminals around the midwest.

we prepared the slide with the help of a lot of grad students in our program. this shows how many daily departures that the busiest railroad station had at the peak of the world war ii era. the first thing you will see is as smug as we are about having the biggest and the best, we are in the top 10, we just have one station represented. that was chicago union station. st. louis and kansas city beat us by significant margin. why did they have a bigger station then we do? >> perhaps they do not have a huge transportation have such as o'hare. you have to rely on high-speed rails in general to travel. >> trains are getting faster. that is not the answer i am

looking for. today in st. louis, they are excited about that prospect, being linked to chicago with high-speed. >> there were four other chicago terminals? >> four. five on the list. that's right. these the cities -- these cities succeeded in creating a centralized hub. saint louis and kansas city captured every train come into that town and connected at the central hub. the synergy was tremendous. people with a single connection would walk across the concourse and you could reach vast destinations across the region. chicago was too big to achieve that. we were too formidable for the railroad industry to try to consolidate our stations into one. chicago is a city of stations that while large, they were not

at the same level and volume as other stations. this created a paradox. this has created all kinds of challenges. as we marched through time we , see that the pressure for chicago becomes the dominant hub and grew. we were the city less equipped to play that role with our station configuration. around the world, we see there are great cities in europe in creating a central have. -- central hall. berlin achieve that. their passenger numbers are well over 1000. we look at the u.s. system in 1942, anonymous. we also see the growth of rail in europe. stations many times our size in terms of volume. we did this analysis.

we wanted to see why some stations died before others. so, move into the 1950's. we see some of these great stations are struggling to hang on. i remember this. going to these large stations, seeing the pigeons flying around seeing the cigarette butts on on the floor, and the sense of decline that created a real doom for the railroad industry, there was a view that the railroad industry was on its way down. there is no way to fix it. we see kansas city station hung on into the 1970's. amtrak is back. the station was too large to service needs. in chicago, we were condemned you might say with six stations. it led to fabulous architecture. a city much like london.

we were surrounded by rubber -- railroad stations each with a personality or architectural quality, which made chicago famous. but for the traveler, we were a royal headache. you could imagine travelers for hundreds of years coming , into chicago from 1870 through the early 1970's arriving in one station and having to schlep their bags to the next. in many cases, the trains were a mile apart. the stations were not connected. you could see the systems that connect many parts of downtown that the system was not a line

to serve the terminals. the terminals were not directly located inside the subway or the rapid transit system. as a result, chicago became kind of a connecting nightmare for travelers. they tried to develop a coherent system of connections surrounding the city. in chicago if you look at the map, the enormity of the footprint. you have tracks all the way to the lake. as railroads declined, you could see the pressure to take his big -- these six stations and consolidate them into one. it became tremendous. as you look at the trends that occurred over time, how quickly did these stations fall in transportation significance?

1942-1956, how many trains? you see the pain of the decline of railroads was truly profound. if you go to columbus union station and indianapolis union station, over 40% of their trains were eliminated. cincinnati, somewhat less. what do you notice about chicago? we stand out a little bit. >> i think there is a little bit of resemblance of that kind of

chicago in that 25% and below kind of category. it kind of shows that all of the stations are on the downfall. maybe we should think about only having one or two. >> chicago has less decline than the others. we are kind of on the right side of the chart. as the system was eliminated some of the lesser routes were the first to go. look at cities in the left hand of the chart. they tend to be smaller than those on the right. detroit is interesting. they are at the far end. detroit was expanding dramatically in the 1950's. the industry in detroit was on fire. you are nodding -- what's that? >> [inaudible]

>> dramatic increase. the other cities had a tough go during this period. chicago weathered the period better than others. as the rail system is on its back here, we see the railroads are eager to -- this shows the train through dayton, ohio. it is a funny looking train. one car. there is probably one passenger on that train. through the early 70's, there are eager to eliminate the entire's system of trains. the interstate commerce commission insisted they remain running until we were commissioned to eliminate those trains. the service became very poor.

as a result, we have this painful period where the passenger train spirals down in many cases. as the routes were eliminated during this difficult period city started to ask, what do i do when the railroad leaves town? we will look at case studies that show all towns have a different experience with this. it led to remarkable redevelopment opportunities that by the enormity of the real estate in the first set of examples, made possible entirely new uses for the railroad. we will go to central station in chicago. we are looking north. this is one of the great streamliner's.

this station was unfortunately torn down just before the historical movement gathered momentum. we flash forward to 1974. you see, it had no future. they called it one of the great lost landmarks. chicago began to see some of the development patterns described earlier. if we go to central station today and look at it from above, we could see in a way downtown is spread to engulf the old property, which is pictured here with the shaded area toward the middle. we have a new development that rejuvenated the area in ways that would have been hard to

imagine in the 1970's. this development is called central station, right? the marketers have an easy job with that one. it got a lot of good attention. we had the museum campus next door. you have splendid views of millennium park. chicago has been redefined as the city because several acres of land remain available by the closing of central station. if we look at this today and go back and see the sake and parcel, we see here along michigan avenue it is now almost complete.

the community is comprised heavily of empty-nesters. they are attracted by the lakefront living. it would be more exciting had we landed the olympic games of 26 -- in 2016. it would have put us in the middle of some exciting developments. let's go to another station. look at grand central. go to that last picture. go to the upper right. you see a nice grassy area. you see some corridors. that is the old tracks to grand central station. if you look at grand central you can see this was one of our

great architectural landmarks. it was called the norman style. while that was never the busiest station, some say it was the most beautiful. grand central is on borrowed time for many years. as a kid, i would remember the pride of the bno passenger train that kept the station functional through the early 1970's. here is a case where we are a mile or two west of central station. the development pattern was completely different. market for real estate, a mile or so west of the property. how does that compare to the demand for lakefront living?

anyone care to comment on that? alex? >> everything in chicago is pretty much based on the lake. >> that's right. it is a fraction of the central station. the railroad toward the station down partially to redevelop the parcel. look at what is there today. a lot of years have passed. a lot of opportunities have come to the loop. when you look at what is left of the central station, here is one of the great trains leaving the grand central. it had a magnificent arch shed trains came out of. fast-forward 1979 to about 2015.

have a look at what is there today. we see here is a case where the closing of a railroad has not matched at all with the market demand for property. 40 years later on that parcel, we are waiting for redevelopment to occur. it has been elusive. one proposal after another comes and goes. we have several forces that conspired to doing this. one is residential development. people don't want to live west of south street. demand has been week there. and it is along the chicago river, which creates all kinds of standards for development. the market has never been able to make this property work. look at how close the two are together. their circumstances have been

enormously different. >> who currently owns the parcel? >> it has changed hands several times. for a while it was owned by the railroad. they tried to find a user. there was speculation that this would be the next casino. it is walkable to the great venues. i'm relieved that proposal didn't happen. a number of movies have been filmed on this site. some chicago classics have been dumped here. -- filmed here. we look north. we go to northwestern station. essentially we have lost four of them with dearborn and union still standing.

the other four are largely demolished. in the case to the north western terminal, this was prime residential land. look at the station at about 1912. it had the classic gothic entrance to it. and a waiting room that was magnificent by anybody's standards with the vaulted ceiling. we see that the railroad terminal was doomed by the fact that the large number of commuters arriving on this property made it prime for office tower development. the station was a victim of its own self. thousands of commuters arriving every day. the demand for that parcel would serve office space for these commuters in the current the -- encouraged the railroad to eliminate the terminal.

if you go to northwestern station today, it has a new name. the old concourse was torn down and replaced by a pretty impressive office power development. it is designed to serve the commuters coming in. all three of these stations we have an entirely different story to tell. in the case of northwestern, it is a happy ending. we lost a landmark, but the value of being next to a railroad led to a transformation that we all benefit from today. as we walk around the country, when i survey communities for the book, we found there is incredible passion behind what the closing of railroads has meant for the city. the second implication i would like to talk about is a small -- for small towns.

what it means for the development outlook and the emotion that goes with the transition from being a railroad town to a non-railroad town. here is a city in idaho. if you can get get out there, i will give you extra credit. [laughter] this is probably the hardest one to get to. there is a great rainbow trout in the river there. avery was an amazing story. it was on one of the most remarkable railroads in the country called the milwaukee road. several hundred miles of road was put under wires. the route had difficult mountain grades. electricity was needed to pull

the freight and passengers up the steep slope. avery had a problem. we read about the milwaukee road earlier this quarter. unhappy ending for this carrier. it obviously affected our city what story do we tell about it? anyone care to remember that? >> [inaudible] >> that's right. it went bankrupt. >> there have been different rail lines that were created. that was a very big one that we lost. >> that's right. they couldn't buy couple of

miles to keep it in service. avery has no other major business. it does not even have a paved highway. it was built entirely to serve the railroad. it is a division where crews point change. avery was optimistic. when the railroad leaves, guest -- guess what we get? a paved road. we never had a paved road in that town. with that will come resort business, small business residential development. , we should get sports fishing in our town. the railroad died in 1980, a sad story. let's go to avery today. let's see what happened. it is a great little town. the road is there.

the town has not seen the 20 story hotels that people perhaps would have liked to see. the postmaster is quite nostalgic about the history. avery lost the battle in many ways. if reporters ask for a town that has really been affected negatively go to avery. , it is a good case where a city lost its reason. charming place. great people. the development proved to be an over optimistic hope. let's go to reed city, michigan. a small town. north of grand rapids. reed city has an interesting distinction. they claimed that they had the finest union station in a city

of its size. how is that for something on the town? we can see two lines crossed here. the predecessor. the city was literally built around the railroad junction. in reed city's case, the development pattern began to change when the logging declined a bit. they're looking for a kind of new economic engine to keep the town going. unfortunately, this is the early 20th century. we go to the 1970's. the station is gone. trains still coming through. the road has been reduced to the

margins of the community's economy. reed city like other cities, we had a tough recession. it lost lots of industrial but throughout our region. the city new it was that it -- nknew it was at a crossroads. the railroad was leaving. it probably couldn't save the railroad. the town decided we had to commemorate the fact that we are only in existence of this location because of the railroad junction. even though the railroad is gone we feel that our identity is the , link to the railroads. we want to not only commemorate the railroad but use it as a way to --

they called it the dimon where -- diamond where the two lines crossed. they called it the diamond crossing. there are often ceremonies out here when people retire. we see lots of activity through town. snowmobilers in the wintertime come to reed city. it led to a really interesting transformation that led to a real sense that reed city had effectively weathered the change and reinvented themselves as a northern michigan playground. we had an interesting controversy. reed city had to look itself in the mirror.

you have the transition away from the railroad sector. do you want to allow one of these routes for the shipment of potash. c-span.org once you make the transition, it is difficult. it was somewhat sobering. it could be difficult to bring them back, even if the market is there. it becomes a bit of a one-way process. lake geneva is notable. it has commuter service all the way up in the 1970's in chicago. lake geneva took great pride. top executives lived up there.

it was a destination of great importance. service continued to decline. i think we read about it this quarter. when the railroad left in 1975 the debate to bring them back has been nonstop. the planning efforts to do that have been extremely challenged by the factors that is outside of our state boundary. we go to the next slide. we can see as they have the debate, we see other forces reared their ugly heads, you might say. i captured this picture showing a school district opposing lake geneva's efforts to embark on planning initiatives to bring its railroad back to strengthen its connection to chicago.

rumor has it -- government agency a may make government agency b take it down really quick. it doesn't look good when they aren't cooperating. the options would have been so much greater for a city like lake geneva to re-strengthen its transportation links to chicago. what is your sense of it today? is it open for redevelopment? >> probably five or 10 minutes outside of town, you could pull that off. putting the tracks back in before it goes through town would be impossible today. >> what is an example of the type of construction you would see? >> new streets. new housing. new businesses. >> sure. >> across the board.

>> it would be a tough go. as we look at the third city, in ohio, we can see the railroad coming through town. they had railroads in five directions. this is a train coming down detroit street. if you go back today, you could see remnants of the track are still there. the police car was looking at me with not so flattering looks when i was photographing. you could see the tracks in the foreground. when i studied the economic impact of abandonment, the city probably more than any other had leverage the benefit of recreational trails in a way that has given it an image that is in effect transformative for the city. we have bike rentals in town.

a lot of summer traffic. two trails cross their. the last thing i want to talk about as we look into the three models. this relates to your project. in some cases, it wasn't as important as the town on that route, but the viability to move between cities that were many miles apart. as i look at the abandonments around the country, the real battle is not in that town, but in the cities that want to be linked by real and had no longer -- links by rail and had no longer the opportunity to do that. we looked at cities as configured in space and are

represented by the population. we have the population of city one being large. the population of two and three being somewhat smaller. we connect these cities. you can see, it we view this as the model of gravitational force, which is in our statistical framework, we have to define how this model is going to work to predict how much traffic will go between these two cities. looking at this model we could , see right away more traffic is likely to move between p1 and p2 than p1 and p3 because it is farther. using this gravitational model that we have developed in this class, which again, is based on

the newtonian law of gravitational force. the difference between p1 and p2 travel will depend on what kind of assumptions we make. anybody care to walk us through why the travel distance will have different effects depending on how we calibrate the model. >> there are political or geographical barriers. >> that's right. other factors come into play. the difference between p1 traffic and p3 traffic depends on what we assigned to the value of k. somebody talk me through that. it has been about a week or so since we did that. what k represents and how we can think about in this context. >> the rate of k.

how willing you are to travel distances. if we assume p3 is more willing to travel long distances, than it is possible that they could have a high demand, especially if people in p2 are unwilling to travel long distances. >> the rate of k shows how traffic diminishes or decays as cities become farther apart. if we have a high rate of decay it would be a small fraction because of the reasons described. as we calibrated our models, we looked around the midwest. let me share with you an example. as i evaluated this, why the closing of 120,000 routes as a -- has had lots of implications

of how we develop intercity networks between cities. this map shows new york. i show this because we see the black line represents the available railroad line between cities. if we have a good look, you have to be patient traveler to get from new york to scranton. it is a tough go. the white line is an abandoned portion. that line is gone. in this example, for a traveler from new york to scranton, we have an active rail line and an abandoned portion and an active rail line.

to offer direct service, you would somehow have to rebuild the section. seems like an easy thing to do. new jersey learned the hard way. that was one of the most remarkable rail lines the u.s. had seen. you can see, it was filled with beautiful viaducts. a direct route through hilly terrain. it was designed to have no highway crossings. it was a perfect railroad route to offer service. today that line is gone and new jersey is eager to bring it back into its control. in one instance, they divided the land of to several dozen small parcels because the government would have to condemn every parcel individually to achieve the maximum amount of money from the government to

bring it back. no city in the country has led -- let something slip away as significant as they did between new york and scranton. they said, you could bring it into service but you would need to rebuild the railroad. 9/11 occurred. we have a recession. new jersey and pennsylvania are struggling to make this project work. new york and scranton are likely to go without servers for quite -- without service for quite some time. this map made me familiar. let's talk about the midwest for a minute and some of your findings. we think about how these routes

are privately run railroads with enormous potential for public use. this map shows relative size of cities around the midwest. chicago, detroit links large cities. chicago omaha links not so large , cities with large cities. some have attractive stops. others serve largely for two end points. it has been fun seeing all of the different results. there is no easy right answer to which corridor is the most attractive. before we look at what the amendment -- abandonment has

been to bring these back, which ones are the most attractive to bring back into public use? >> i found that cincinnati was the most attractive. it has a lot more demand than other routes. it is also more economically healthy. i looked at the unemployment rate of all of the cities of well. >> at first glance, it does look not very attractive. you add the intermediate stop, minneapolis, and there is a lot of traffic to tween the two points. you are right. yes, cincinnati -- and fast, a study that i did came to the

same conclusion, it is the most attractive. >> the twin cities and chicago. i found that not only do the two endpoints go together, but there are some stops that are fairly sizable and friendly to other transits. that is what struck me about indianapolis and saint paul as well. they have installed four lines. there are a lot of branches to go to, and it would be easy for travelers without cars to get around. >> it is a good synopsis. the environmental factors are favorable. distance is problematic.

that endpoints are much more -- it's a very transit progressive city. >> one other thing i notice is i tracked what but travel times -- what the travel time, driving versus train was and they were pretty close. you are not going through city after city after city. in reality, it takes you as long as it takes to drive to minneapolis, and is probably an hour longer on the train. >> there's a time difference. speed would increase. sure. >> same thing with twin cities. i looked a lot at university and how many students there are. because the university of minnesota is so large, it has such a population. it is important that i added wisconsin on the route as well given all of the travel, especially for college students

going for interviews or being able to travel between cities is important. a lot of college students don't have cars. >> colleges have great affinity to large metropolitan areas. i think in medicine, we are seeing that. there is a rail friendly demographic. great comments. let's look at why this creates a difficult public process. we take these routes and show which cases agencies have them to prevent a route from being lost or abandoned as railroads cut back. we take this map and we look at the route. we see many of them have had segments where significant links

were at risk of being pulled up or torn up. the private railroad industry had relatively little use for that route. the madison segment, there is a small segment that was very lightly used. in michigan, there is a segment that was at risk of being lost. governments have a responsibility to be stewards over these corridors. a couple of final thoughts. to give you a sense of that, if we go to the cleveland corridor, one segment is one of the most famous routes in the u.s. from chicago to new york. the future of the cleveland corridor through fort wayne, you could see chicago to fort wayne

to toledo -- it has been restored. it keeps the promise of rail service on the chicago-fort wayne route very much alive. if we go to michigan, when amtrak was created, it created a difficult proposition that could take ownership of some of the route. it was going to be pulled up. the most direct route between chicago and detroit was under the threshold of being lost until it was purchased or acquired by amtrak. i think we heard from our speaker a few weeks ago, we talked to dave phillips that in addition to this segment, the state of michigan has acquired large segments of the detroit route that make it a most entirely the public control.

it is a very exciting prospect for improving rail service. the last thing i will close on is around the country we are seeing a lot of aggressive action. two look at these corridors, and see that they have great strategic value. in addition to the land, the interest in saving the corridor doors -- new commuter services to be added is rising sharply. it has been very gratifying to see that there has been a number of really successful cases now where agencies have intervened to save corridors from being lost. as i mentioned, once it becomes a regulation -- recreation trail or has another use, it is very tough to bring the railroad back. santa monica stands out.

you can see the old route which is shown in the upper left. it needed a little help. it was laying there unused. the railroad was abandoned in 1986. a group of citizens decided that they needed to save the route. you can see by the size of that tree next to the route that a lot of years had passed since then. in santa monica positive case, a city of 100,000 people had no other rail line and people realized that the corridor had a lot of potential. in fact, pushed government agencies, the metropolitan transit district to save the route. it had a happy ending. if we look at the plans of extending the light rail system in santa monica, and los angeles, it can see they are -- you can see they are moving west towards santa monica. phase one will be to move to culver city. phase two, they will take it to santa monica.

it will require eliminating some of the -- pulling up the tracks and relaying them. if you fast-forward to 2015, we can see that they have made it all the way up to culver city. with a very impressive light rail line which is doing quite well on ridership. the perfect example where right-of-way preserve can be brought back into use for a new generation of travelers in a very thoughtful way. now the plan is to push the line out towards santa monica and to bring that city back to the rail system in ways that it would've not been possible if the citizens had not pushed for saving that route. in closing, the book tries to show that the abandonment of railroad lines creates redevelopment issues that are fascinating but important in looking at the lifecycle of cities.

cities have phases of development and when the railroad leaves town, it brings on a new era that draws upon the railroad's legacies in many fast -- fascinating ways. being here in downtown chicago we feel that because so much of the development is on former railroad lands. in small towns, it is much more emotional about development and opportunities for attracting manufactures and public transit services that need railroad right-of-way to be successful. we can see that for largest cities that seek high-speed rail, abandonment patterns create a lot of public pressure for agencies to come in and acquire or support routes to allow for better service to continue. it is not an appreciated story. i'm glad we had a chance to talk about it today. thank you all for a good class.

>> you are watching "american history tv," all weekend every weekend. to join the conversation, like us on facebook. >> director of clinical cardiology at brigham and women's hospital in boston, on the advances of heart surgery and the progress being made in the understanding of heart health. >> this actually is a valve that has been crimped onto this catheter that is being now positioned into the diseased valve and it will be deployed here in just a second with the balloon being inflated. and a new valve will be inserted inside the old calcified stenotic valve. as you can see here, the delivery system is being withdrawn and then the wire will

be withdrawn. and what we have just seen in this display is replacement of a diseased aortic valve. in a manner that does not require over heart surgery. so we are trying to become smarter about predicting who will get disease. we are trying to become smarter as to identify the most effective means to prevent or attenuate the disease, and smarter about following up over a longer. of time -- p longereriod -- of time -- longer period of time. -- with all the informatics i can be driven by the giants of the industries, like google, for example, and information about sociology, geography demographics, where you live, what your likelihood is to get diabetes on the basis of your

educational background, and what is your likelihood of developing diabetes or hypertension if you live in a certain part of the city that has less access to the right kind of foods or the right kinds of education about sodium intake. >> tonight at 8:00 eastern and pacific on c-span's q&a. coming up next on "american history tv," cumberland university history professor mark cheathem talks about his book, "andrew jackson southerner." in -- he believes that jackson's upbringing in the south is more aligned with that of an elite southern gentleman. this 50 minute program was hosted by the library of congress.